


the last shot ringing in my ears

by fideliant



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Groundhog Day, Angst, Battle of Five Armies, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 22:06:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2827718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fideliant/pseuds/fideliant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He just doesn’t want to have to hold Bilbo’s broken body in his arms anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the last shot ringing in my ears

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler warning for BoTFA.
> 
> This was initially written a long time ago for a kinkmeme fill I have since lost the link to. Now rewritten to fit the events of the recent film, although the timeline differs slightly.

He’s not going to make it.

Azog looms over him, snarling, presses down. The tip of his blade comes shy of an inch away from Thorin’s chest. Thorin pushes back with Orcrist, hard. Azog pushes down harder. A little less than an inch left.

Thorin struggles again, tries to leverage the blade away from his body, but the look on Azog’s face tells him that they both know how this will end. Slowly, surely, inevitably. He can almost see the precise moment when it happens, taste it on his lips like the coming of something foul. There’s nowhere for Thorin to go, nobody to save him this time round.

_Bilbo…_

The ice is hard under his back. Cold and hard, and Thorin’s legs have gone numb, his body beginning to give up long before he has. He didn’t think he’d die like this.

It’s alright, he supposes.

When he does die, it shall not have been in vain.

He closes his eyes one last time, steels himself for the pain, and just _lets go._

There’s a dull thud, a grunt, and then Azog’s weight disappears entirely. Thorin blinks his eyes open and looks around and — it’s Bilbo again — Bilbo! — wrestling with the orc as they sprawl across the ice to the far side, a tangle of limbs and blades, but Azog is very strong and larger than the hobbit, and it takes a very short while for Bilbo to be overpowered and lifted into the air by his neck.

Everything seems to slow, then, from Bilbo kicking his legs as he struggles to breathe, to when Azog raises his blade, glinting sunlight off of its edge, and in the instant he thrusts forward and stabs deep, Thorin opens his mouth and screams.

And screams.

He is standing in front of Azog before he can process what’s happening, Orcrist sticking into bleach-white flesh, and the orc dies very quickly but Thorin just _shoves_ him aside and crouches down onto the ice and gathers Bilbo’s shaking body into his arms. Such a small body, Thorin thinks. Smaller than he remembers. The front of the hobbit’s tunic is already soaked red and sticky and every time Bilbo coughs more blood bubbles out from his open wound in his chest, dribbling into the fabric. His eyes tick to Thorin, fluttering shut for a second before they are wide and blue-green and pleading again. He looks so scared.

“Bilbo,” Thorin chokes, and this is when he realises he is crying. He tries to say something else but his tongue feels like it’s swollen and he cannot summon the words. Nothing else will come forth but Bilbo’s name, and only that, so he says it again. And again. Bilbo shivers, presses his trembling lips together. His face has gone deathly pale and there are tears gathering in his eyes, too. He looks so scared.

“No. No, no, please, _don’t_ —”

When Bilbo gives one last feeble cough and goes very still, his eyes remain on Thorin, beautiful against the evening sky reflected in them, but blank and empty of recognition. His hands are already too cold. This isn’t happening. Thorin holds him and buries his face in Bilbo’s bloodied chest and screams until it hurts, screams for the world to stop.

The eagles swoop down from overhead, their long wings blocking out the setting sun.

 

***

 

Thorin opens his eyes to darkness.

Dark. Cold. Musty.

He’s not sure where he is, but he remembers war, and fighting, and, and —

_Bilbo is dead._

He sits up so abruptly it makes his head spin and looks around, half-wild. Ruins around him, cracked marble floors, vaulting arches that curve into an impenetrable blackness hundreds of metres above from where he is. A familiar-looking corridor stretches to the far end of the room, littered with pieces of rock and broken stone columns. He knows this place.

Erebor.

“Thorin.”

Thorin jolts as he swivels, hand reaching for a weapon that’s not there, and comes face-to-face with Balin, who startles and takes a step back with his hands raised slightly.

“Thorin — Thorin, please. I just want to talk.”

Thorin stares at him.

“Look, Thorin…” Balin sighs. “There’s — look, there’s no easy way to say this. But I must, even if you won’t listen. You’ve changed, Thorin. You’ve changed ever since we came back — ever since we came _home_ — and you cannot see it. The king I followed here would’ve never allowed himself to be lost to anything as piddling as gold.”

Gold? Yes, yes, Thorin recalls faintly — several lifetimes’ worth of it, kept under the mountain somewhere. But that’s not what leaps to the front of his mind, because the last thing he remembers before all of this is Bilbo dying, Bilbo dead, Bilbo _gone,_ and suddenly he just needs to _know._

“Bilbo,” Thorin whispers, his voice raspy with sleep.

Something in Balin seems to harden at that. “Aye.”

Thorin swallows around the emptiness in his throat. “Where… where is he?”

Balin doesn’t respond for several long seconds. Then, as he lowers his gaze to the floor, so softly as to conceal any emotion lining his words: “Of all people to ask, Thorin.”

Thorin can’t breathe. He is going to be sick. He sits back down in lieu of collapsing where he stands and covers his mouth and does not cry or come apart, just folds in on himself and heaves and tries to contain the terrible, terrible noises he is making with his own voice.

“Thorin…?”

“I’m sorry,” Thorin gasps through shaking fingers. His tears drip down his chin and into his lap. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

“Thorin, for gods’ sake —” Balin is now kneeling in front of him, face stern but eyes alight with concern. “Telling _me_ that isn’t going to change anything, now, is it? But there is still time. You _can_ make amends.”

Thorin shakes his head, over and over again, because Balin doesn’t understand, he can’t understand, otherwise he wouldn’t be saying that, and —

“Give the menfolk what you promised them. Talk to the elves; I don’t believe they cannot be reasoned with. Stop this madness while you still can. And then — and then you can tell Bilbo what you just told me.”

Thorin stops. “I… what?”

“You’re an honourable dwarf, Thorin. I’m sure Bilbo knows that as well. Mayhaps it is still in his nature to forgive you what you did to him, but you won’t know until you try.”

Thorin feels his heart jolt, because now, it’s starting to come back to him, bit by bit: the night before the battle, Balin coming to see him, here in this exact chamber, _Thorin, please, I just want to talk,_ and Thorin had dismissed him without a second thought. But that was before, and the world had gone to hell the next day, and they’d lost Fili, and so many others before and after that, and Bilbo had died too, bleeding out in Thorin’s arms. A dream, then? It had felt so real.

He doesn’t know what to think.

“Leave me,” Thorin murmurs.

He can almost feel Balin stiffen. “Thorin —”

“I said, _leave me._ ”

The silence that follows is thick and lasting, and when Balin does go, the sound of the door closing behind him reverberates about the hall, stays with Thorin for ages.

 

***

 

“Will you have peace?” Bard calls up the ramparts, and this… this is all too familiar for something that is only happening right now. “Or war?”

“I will have _war,_ ” Thorin declares, but the fire that had raged in him when he had first made this choice feels smaller, weaker, somehow.

 

***

 

The orc horde comes streaming in from the west without warning, just as before, and this time it doesn’t take Thorin very long at all to figure out his next move. The right one.

Which is why when the orcs backpedal and start to advance on the ghost city Dale has become, Thorin explicitly decides not to go barrelling off after Azog on a death mission, let alone with Fili at his side.

“You lot, with me!” he bellows at one of Dain’s contingents. They still may lose the war just yet, but they’ve a fighting chance and he has to believe it, no matter what. The eagles are coming. This is how they will win the battle. The eagles will come. He holds on to that even though he cannot know for sure.

They make it across the plains and into Dale, cutting a swathe through the orcs that have remained behind to continue the siege on Erebor, and by the time they are on the other side, they have lost a third of their numbers. Thorin decides quickly, sending half of them to push in and rally to the elves and menfolk already fighting within the city walls, and retains the other half with him at the city entrance to hold the bottleneck. If they can just slow down the invasion, even just a little bit, then maybe, maybe —

The wall next to them explodes into plaster and brick dust. Thorin twists, shielding his face, and turns back in time to stave off the wave of orcs that swarms through the breach. He kills five, maybe eight orcs before a blade finds its place in his body; just a scratch, nothing too serious, but it still does hurt even as he fights on.

Then, he hears screaming coming from one of the alleyways leading away from the square they’re defending. Young, terrified voices. Thorin cuts down another orc and looks and, his heart jumps because there are three menfolk younglings cornered by a towering orc giant, separated only by one hobbit clumsily brandishing an elvish dagger up at it.

Thorin already has Bilbo’s name in his mouth, but that doesn’t stop the moment where Bilbo misses a slash with Sting and the orc giant swings low with its massive granite club, smashing it into the hobbit’s tiny form. Bilbo goes flying in an arc, slams against a wall with a crunch so loud Thorin can almost feel every bone in his body break, crumples to the cobblestone floor in a heap and does not move.

Thorin’s insides go cold as he screams. Again.

This time it is Bard, lunging at the orc from atop a broken wheelbarrow, who avenges Bilbo, and Thorin’s face is already wet when he’s kneeling at Bilbo’s side, trying to shake him conscious. He’s not breathing. His eyes are still half-open, a shocked look still within them. Thorin presses on his chest, searches for a heartbeat that is no longer there. The only thing he finds is the crackling of the hobbit’s shattered ribs under the palm of his hand.

“No. No, no, no. Don’t do this, _don’t_ —”

Bilbo’s body is heavy in his arms as Thorin finally allows the shakes to overtake him, which turn into whole, wrenching sobs as the eagle’s shadow around them grows larger, and larger still.

 

***

 

He wakes up and it’s dark. Cold.

Musty.

_What…?_

Thorin bolts upright, stands and whirls around to ruins and hallways and arches. Erebor.

It’s happening again.

“Thorin — Thorin, please. I just want to talk.”

He turns to Balin and it must be the look on his face, because Balin blinks with equal parts confusion and concern and asks, “Thorin? What’s the matter?”

The matter is: he doesn’t know. He doesn’t.

Thorin closes his eyes, takes a breath in through his mouth, and lets the truth rise out of him like the sun of a dead world. “Balin… Balin, something’s wrong.”

 

***

 

“So,” Balin says slowly, “you’re saying that this — all of this, has happened before.”

Thorin nods, and gods, it sounds just as insane as it feels. Maybe it’s really as simple as that. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone out of his mind. The steadiness in Balin’s tone seems to suggest that he’s not the only one contemplating that possibility.

But Balin clears his throat and offers, instead, “This… it sounds like magic.”

Thorin nods, even though it wouldn’t make any difference to him if it was or wasn’t. He just wants to know how to make it stop.

“You have to talk to Gandalf.”

Thorin laughs softly. Somehow, even this far away from him, it always comes back to seeking the blasted wizard’s help. Even though getting Gandalf’s input has never been more relevant considering the circumstances, he feels his stomach sour nonetheless.

“Thorin,” Balin says, low, urgent. It feels like all of the air in the hall is slowly being drawn out. “What are you going to do?”

What, indeed. Thorin doesn’t know either.

 

***

 

“Will you have peace? Or war?”

Thorin’s chest constricts. He can feel Balin’s eyes on his back, but it doesn’t matter. He will not fail this time round. Today is the day he saves Bilbo Baggins.

He lifts his head and says as clearly as he can, “Peace.”

Down by the broken bridge, Bard and Thranduil exchange a look.

 

***

 

Fighting the same war for the third time is just as difficult, and bloody. But it’s harder to be ambushed by an army you know is coming, and fewer die at the beginning for that fact.

Well, fewer elves, dwarves, menfolk. They kill more orcs than Thorin remembers and he starts to wonder, somewhat manically, if they even have to wait for the eagles to show up at all. If it will even make a difference. Too much of his brethren still die, in the end. That doesn’t change. Some things never do, he thinks.

(This has to. It must.)

Dain’s army cuts the orcs off before they can descend onto Dale, and this is how Thorin realises that there will be no fighting there. Bilbo Baggins will not die defending the defenceless and that’s enough, that’s all Thorin needs to know. He just needs to _find_ him, that’s all, find him and keep him close and protect him, up until the war is finally won and they’re both safe.

He spots Bilbo fighting just yards from the river, just as he is about to direct the coalition he’s leading to dismantle Azog’s command post, and he’s already halfway to him before there are shouts at his back for further orders. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stop, because the sight of Bilbo alive is too good and too true and it’s the best thing Thorin has seen in decades. It’s almost dizzying, watching him sheathe Sting in an orc with a yell, and the double-take he performs when Thorin calls his name is astonished and frightened and relieved, all at once.

“Thorin…!”

“Get behind me. Stay close.” An orc charges at them, sword flashing. Thorin guts him with a single slash, kicks him to the ground.

" _Gods,_ Thorin."

"Quiet. Don't lower your guard."

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ll explain later, just listen to me —”

“Thorin, watch out!”

A heavy shove from behind sends Thorin toppling into the dirt, which is why he doesn’t register the spear flying through the air at him until he shakes the ringing from his ears and looks up.

It’s sticking out of Bilbo’s belly.

_No no no no no no no —_

Bilbo gapes wordlessly, with what seems to be an _oh_ attempting to form on his lips, hands clutched around the hilt as he sways on his feet. Thorin lunges to catch him before he falls over, doesn’t even bother looking for who threw it, because Bilbo’s tunic is soaked red and sticky and this is wrong, this is all wrong, this should not be happening. Not now.

“Would you look at that,” Bilbo murmurs, almost pensively.

“Hush.” He’s pressing around the edges of the spear, but the flow of blood isn’t slowing. Bilbo cracks a shaky smile up at him. Sometimes Thorin wishes he weren’t always so brave, this hobbit. “You’ll be alright, just hang on, please, just…”

“Ooh, they’ll have my silver spoons, and Bag End too, won’t they, those dreadful Sackville-Bagginses —”

“You’ll be alright, help is coming, I promise, the eagles are coming —”

“— never got my handkerchief after all, come to think of it; would’ve been nice to be buried with it, but what’s a hobbit to do about that…”

“Bilbo…”

“…think I might’ve left a window open, too —”

Thorin drops his forehead to Bilbo’s and sobs for as long as it takes for him to go, holds him for what feels like ages as the world around them continues to fall apart. Screaming and warring and dying like a quake splitting the earth in two, alien sounds battering his coat, the air hanging still and frozen, a flap of eagle’s wings.

 

***

 

“Thorin — Thorin, please. I just want to talk.”

He brushes at hot, stinging tears and bites his tongue until he tastes metal. What good has that done?

_What good?_

 

***

 

He forgot what it’s like to be afraid of death, is the funny thing. That dwarfling nightmare burned to the ground the day Erebor did and he’s lived with the embers ever since, but death has been just that to Thorin — muted, smouldering, a poor imitation of something once fearful. There are about a hundred different things worse than departing from this wretched world like a memory, things that could tear at him, wring him out, make him wish he were dead. Things that have done just that. Azanulbizar, Azog’s return, the day his father never came home. When he thinks of everything he’s lost, without fail, death seems simple enough to bear. Trifling, even. It has always been like this.

He should have known better than that.

 

***

 

Trampled by an orc.

Mauled by a warg.

A crushed skull, the result of a falling boulder.

Falling, just falling.

Thorin screams, every single time.

 

***

 

The day he wakes up with yet another way he couldn’t save Bilbo, he storms onto the battlefield the instant it begins, finds the hobbit, picks him up, and starts running back to Erebor as fast as he can.

“Hey! What in the —”

“Are you unharmed? _Are you unharmed?”_ It’s not the simplest task, checking someone over for injury whilst you’re hauling them to safety and they’re simultaneously trying to get free, but Thorin does his best and finds nothing of concern. This does not make him slow down. If anything, he doubles up.

“Put me down!” Bilbo shouts, pounding Thorin’s back with his fists. “Thorin Oakenshield, I demand that you put me down this _instant!”_

“Be quiet, be quiet!”

“Oh, you oaf, you horrid oaf! Gandalf will hear about this, mark my words —”

“Stop struggling, damn it…!”

Bilbo does comply, far too quickly, but also makes an odd gasping noise and there’s this _jerk_ that stops Thorin’s heart cold. He can’t even bring himself to a scream anymore when he turns his head and finds Bilbo folded limply over his shoulder, the arrow still quivering in the hobbit’s soft throat.

 

***

 

He supposes he should be thankful. The quickest deaths usually pull him away in an instant. No matter how much of the battle there’s left to fight. The eagles always end it. He comes to dread them so very, very much. And on top of that, Bilbo doesn’t suffer for very long. The quickest deaths are just that, quick, and it feels like it should count for something.

It doesn’t.

 

***

 

Thorin wakes with tears in his eyes and scratch marks in the stone beneath his fingers and the screech of an eagle fading in his ears. Darkness all around him and a musty smell in the cold air. The night before the war.

Again.

When he can move, Thorin gets up and finds a corner and retches until his stomach is weak and empty and cramping. His knees buckle and leave him slumped against a wall, heaving dry breaths in through his nose as he tries and tries to pull himself together.

He hears Balin’s footsteps approaching and thinks, _please._

 

***

 

Maybe, just maybe —

There will never be any other way for this to end.

 

***

 

Not long after, he surprises Gandalf by showing up at the elven barracks before break of dawn, alone and unarmed. The wizard shows no sign of being surprised by this, but Thorin’s been stuck with him long enough to be able to read consternation in the tilt of his hat, in the way his thick eyebrows join in the middle of his forehead for a second the first time they see each other again.

“What do you want, Thorin?”

“I need to speak with him.”

Gandalf bristles. “I won’t allow it.”

Anger bubble up in Thorin like magma. “I’m not asking you to allow it, Gandalf.”

“What makes you think Bilbo would be comfortable with seeing you again, Thorin?”

“Do not presume to speak for him.”

“If to protect him from those who would cause him harm, then I think I jolly well do,” Gandalf says, his voice rising a few stages.

Thorin glares up at him, preparing to argue, but just… can’t. The time for being angry is long past. He’s had that moment already, so very long ago, and now is not the time for that. He lowers his eyes as if to admit defeat.

“Look — if you won’t let me see him, then… a message, please. Just a message. That’s all.”

Gandalf is silent, then coughs softly. “What is it?”

“I’m sorry,” Thorin says, and manages not to choke on it. When he looks back up, Gandalf’s face is still stern but his eyes are no longer narrowed. “Tell him… tell him I’m sorry, and. I won’t stop. I won’t ever stop trying to find a way. I will find a way to save him. Will — will you tell him that?”

Gandalf watches Thorin for several seconds longer. A horn sounds from the barracks, crisp and sharply resonant. The wizard clears his throat, taps his staff against the earth as he turns to leave. “Goodbye, Thorin.”

Above them, tendrils of orange light begin to lick the ashen sky back into day.

 

***

 

He doesn’t even get anywhere near close on this instance. It takes Thorin too long to find him, looking in all the places he once knew Bilbo to be before realising that he’s missed something vital, that it’s always a different location each time round. By the time he finally comes across him the hobbit is lying on the ground among hundreds of the nameless dead, Sting still in his hand, his neck bent at an impossible angle, no pulse under his skin. Thorin has nothing left to give for this. He picks the hobbit up as he always has done and fights through the tears to press a shaking kiss to Bilbo’s cooling forehead.

 

***

 

As it turns out, if a chamber is large enough, it will echo just about anything. Even the quietest of sobs.

 

***

 

He just doesn’t want to have to hold Bilbo’s broken body in his arms anymore.

 

***

 

This is after.

Gandalf is talking to him, but Thorin can’t quite make it out, because he’d come down from Erebor just as before, _I need to speak with him, I don’t care if you won’t allow it, I will speak with him and I’ll cut anyone down who tries to stop me, even you,_ but then Gandalf said something that had stopped him short, drained all the determination out of him like molten iron from a cracked brazier.

He’s lost all strength for screaming at this point, so Thorin repeats, barely above a whisper: “Heartbreak.” It doesn’t even reach the lilt of a question, because his voice catches on something mid-syllable and he can’t pick it back up again.

The wizard nods, eyes cold with fury. The grey in them glints, the colour of a thunderstorm. He looks at Thorin in the same fashion one might gaze upon a trodden-on slug. “I’d always known hobbits to be… emotional, but — not like this. Never like this.”

Thorin blinks. This doesn’t make any sense. Of all people, Bilbo Baggins had always been so strong, so full of life, hardly at all the sort to be brought down by a broken heart. “How could this… I don’t understand — _why?”_

Gandalf lets out a bark of humourless laughter. “Gold has blinded you to more than just reason, it would seem.”

The sadness in Gandalf’s tone freezes Thorin. In the moment that their gazes meet with understanding, it becomes all too much for him. His head spins violently and his chest hurts like it’s about to burst, and he’s aware that he’s falling over and the world swims against him like a tide rushing up, until there’s nothing but sky and blank space and he throws his grief into it.

Far away, an eagle calls.

 

***

 

(he didn’t mean it like that.)

 

***

 

He wakes in the dead of night.

Dark, cold, musty, ruins.

“Thorin — Thorin, please. I just want to talk.”

Thorin rolls to face the wall so Balin won’t see him cry himself back to sleep.

 

***

 

The sun rises over the battlements in a bank of clouds, and Thorin stares at it for as long as he possibly can before his eyes start to hurt and he has to shut them.

“Will you have peace? Or war?”

He brushes the faded stone of the ramparts with his fingers. They remind him of too much. They’re so very high up, he realises. He never really thought about that. The drop could very easily kill a hobbit, no question. Possibly a dwarf, too, provided they jump head-first onto the rocks far below. Maybe he won’t wake up then. Maybe Bilbo won’t have to die fighting this endless war of his.

_I’ll vouch for him. I’ll vouch for Thorin Oakenshield._

Thorin opens his eyes and the new day gives him nothing.

“I will have _war._ ”

 

***

 

He takes too long to get out onto the battlefield, after Dwalin turns his back on him and Kili calls him coward, and hates himself for it on both instances.

He watches Azog run Fili through for the second time and wonders, as his nephew falls dead, if he still has it in him. He screams all the same.

And as Thorin steps out onto the ice again, sword drawn, Azog sneers at him from across the frozen lake and he cannot breathe.

It’s obvious to him, now, that from the beginning, there was only ever one way for this to end.

 

***

 

He’s not going to make it.

Azog looms over him, snarling, presses down. The tip of his blade comes shy of an inch away from Thorin’s chest. Thorin pushes back with Orcrist, hard. Azog pushes down harder. A little less than an inch left.

Thorin doesn’t struggle. Nothing will come of trying to leverage the blade away from his body to avoid a fatal blow, or fighting; his legs have gone numb and this tells him that his body is already giving up long before he has. There’s nowhere for him to go and nobody to save him, he’s going to die like this, and that’s fine. He’s fine with that.

He closes his eyes one last time, steels himself and it _hurts_ when Azog’s blade pierces to the quick. Azog makes a bellowing noise that sounds nothing like victory; it’s when Thorin gasps himself into moving to stab back with Orcrist does he see that someone else has already beaten him to it.

A spurt of blood gushes from Azog’s thigh, spattering the surface of Sting while Bilbo fights for purchase to push it deeper. Thorin can’t move to stop him, or push him away, or do anything at all before the orc shrieks again, pulls his blade out of Thorin and uses it to slash a red line across Bilbo’s chest. Bilbo stumbles, still swinging with his sword, but Azog is very strong and larger than the hobbit, and it takes a very short while for Bilbo to be overpowered and lifted into the air by his neck, and in the instant Azog raises his blade —

The Pale Orc’s back swallows Orcrist almost too readily, metal grinding against bone, as Thorin pushes his body up on one knee to stab him through the heart.

Azog releases Bilbo, then drops to the ice in an almighty crash.

Thorin keels onto his front, coughing up dark droplets onto the ice. The pain in his chest is unbelievable but he drags himself over the ice, to a motionless Bilbo, takes his hand, checks clumsily for a pulse. Still there, yes, but weak, and failing fast.

It takes Thorin several agonising seconds to realise that Bilbo’s fingers are squeezing back. He swallows and looks up into tearful eyes. Wide and blue-green and pleading, but beautiful, so beautiful, and Thorin is trying to mouth _I’m sorry, I’m sorry,_ but at least they’re dying together this time and Bilbo won’t have to do this alone.

He lifts Bilbo’s hand to his mouth, scrapes his lips over his knuckles.

Wings bloom against the backdrop of the burning sky.

Everything fades.

 

***

 

He rises back to the surface of consciousness and it’s dark out. A musty air about. Warm.

_Warm._

Wait a minute.

Hm, that’s not right.

Thorin tries to sit up and a constricting pain around his midsection stops him. He keeps himself from gasping by turning his attention to other smaller, duller pains in the rest of his body, and how his chest feels like it’s full of splinters. He’s not lying on stone, or earth, but what seems to be a cot. There is a thin blanket draped over him and bandages envelop his body from waistline to neck. The faint outline of a cloth ceiling greets him when he blinks his eyes to adjust them. It’s still dark, but he can make out tiny pinpricks of light beyond the fabric walls of the tent he’s in. Not ruins, not anymore, but a tent.

“You’re awake,” a familiar voice says.

Thorin shudders. Gandalf. He turns his head to look and finds that there are two cots in the tent. The wizard is seated between them, smoking pipe in hand. He’s missing his hat and his arm is in a sling. He looks peculiar without his hat, Thorin thinks.

“Gandalf…”

“Thorin.”

“Where —”

“Erebor. Well, we’re close enough, anyway.”

“How —”

“The eagles brought both of you back. Just in time, I might add,” Gandalf tells him. “I would have had them come to our aid a lot earlier but things were… miscommunicated.”

Thorin looks blankly at Gandalf.

“Yes, hm. Miscommunicated,” Gandalf continues, taking a long puff of smoke in from his pipe. “We’ll have to work out the tubes on that, won’t we…”

Thorin keeps staring. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t this. Is he still trapped? This part hasn’t happened before. Seems to fit the pattern. He’s not sure if he wants to find out.

“You said both of us,” he begins.

The wizard smiles, then moves aside to reveal the occupant of the cot next to Thorin.

Bilbo lies curled up on his side, his bandages strikingly similar to Thorin. His eyes are closed and his breathing is slow and unlaboured. Another bandage peeks out from under brown curls. His features lie slack and edgeless in sleep, but every now and then he wrinkles his nose gently in a sniff. His unscarred arm dangles off the edge of his cot, fingers nearly brushing the ground.

Thorin can’t stop looking at him.

“He was inconsolable, when he thought you were gone,” Gandalf says softly.

Thorin says nothing. He can’t shift his mind anywhere from the warm, breathing, _living_ fact lying within arm’s reach of him, not dead in the slightest. This doesn’t at all feel like a dream. He can’t stop looking at him.

“He’ll be alright,” Gandalf says, settling back into his chair. “Got a few pretty nasty cuts, but no lasting damage, I should think. I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you, though…”

“The rest?” Thorin mumbles, and Gandalf looks surprised.

“Fine. Everyone is fine.”

Thorin hesitates to ask. “And Fili?”

“With his brother.”

And that’s… fine, yes. Fine. Thorin can’t think of another word for it. “Fine,” he even says, and it doesn’t sound like a question. The battle is won and the war is past and he’ll have time to find his bearings in the world they’ve saved, later. For now, he lies still and watches Bilbo sleep. While he can.

“I expect you’ll want your rest,” Gandalf says, gives a small grin when Thorin nods uncertainly. “You’ve certainly earned it. If you need anything, just call for it, and I — ah, someone will be there to attend. I think.”

Thorin doesn’t look away from Bilbo. “An extra blanket. Please.”

A pause, then Gandalf sighs, reaching under the cot, “Alright, but only just this once —”

“Not me.”

Another pause, then, “Ah.”

Thorin waits for Gandalf to drape the second blanket over Bilbo’s shoulders, niggles him into tucking Bilbo’s stray arm by the hobbit’s side, and murmurs his thanks. Bilbo doesn’t so much as stir. Exhausted, Thorin thinks. He feels very much the same way. Already he feels himself slipping back to sleep; he’s just so tired, but they are here, and alive, and as Thorin’s eyelids flutter shut he thinks, _I never told Bilbo I —_

He’ll tell him in the morning. When he wakes.


End file.
